That is why I distinguished between creators and manufacturers, the creators do deserve to be rewarded. It is also why I said we as a society need to come up with a system to reward them for their creations.
If you are willing to be taken down a few pegs, let me suggest that you demonstrate your virtue by donating your PC to someone living in the streets of Calcutta, and give away all of your other possessions to anyone who has less than you do.
Wolverine to Magneto: "You're so full of shit, if you were really that righteous it would be you in there."
Can we assume you are available to lead the World Government you wish to establish? Gosh, what a swell world it would be with you in charge. Perhaps the logo of the World Government would be a picture of you with your foot on the throat of all of mankind - grinding them into submission to your mighty will.
Please stand in line with the other psychopaths, your application to be ruler of the world will be considered in due time.
Theft is illegal because it harms society as a whole. If I steal something physical from you I can't get as much for it with a fence as you could have gotten by selling it on the open market; thus the total wealth in society has decreased. A society based on theft would fail in a constantly spiraling decline of wealth as everyone stole from everyone.
Please note that there are people who do benefit from the theft of physical objects; the thief has and increase in wealth, and the manufacturer of the object benefits, since they get to sell another copy to replace the one which was stolen. This does not compensate for the direct loss of the victim, and the loss to society as a whole from the decrease in value of the original stolen object.
In the case of intellectual property just the opposite occurs. If I copy an existing disk the wealth of society INCREASES; there are now two copies of the original which can do more work than the previous existing copy could. Who loses? The owner of the disk does not lose, he still has his original copy. I benefit, I can now do something I couldn't do before. The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of an additional sale by my act of copying. Notice that I said the MANUFACTURER, not the CREATOR; there is a difference. Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits from the sale of that software.
Please note that in the case of physical theft the manufacturer benefits. I HAVE NEVER HEARD A MANUFACTURER COMPLAIN ABOUT BENEFITING FROM PHYSICAL THEFT. Have you? By failing to do so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
There is a critical difference between material goods and IP; in the digital world the digital equivalent of the 'Star Trek Replicator' exists, it is a CDROM burner or a floppy disk drive. Given a pattern to work from these can replicate the original. Think how much the economy would change if physical replicators existed. Manufacturing would become obsolete - each person with a replicator would in effect become a manufacturer.
What the software MANUFACTURERS want to do is to benefit from the fact that replication exists in the digital world while preventing everyone else from using their own replicators. Of course they do, if physical replicators existed physical manufacturers would try to keep people from using them while they got to use them to make outrageous profits.
Last year Microsoft had NET profits of 40% of sales. That is NET, not GROSS profits. The net figure comes after their accountants have pulled every trick in the book trying to reduce the number to minimize taxes. Microsoft's huge profit occur because they are using replication technology to build their product, it costs them less than a dollar to create a copy of a program which sells for hundreds of dollars.
Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which Microsoft turns into billions of dollars worth of profits by using their replicators, and forbidding us to use ours.
The free market system has worked well for us in the past when it comes to the manufacturing of physical goods. However it breaks down in the face of replication technology. We need to come up with a system which rewards the actual CREATORS of software instead of rewarding people who are using digital replicators to gouge the public for billions of dollars, while trying to deny to individuals the use of that technology.
A few questions. Where did you get the 30% power loss for distribution figure? If 30% of the power were lost in the distribution grid the whole thing would glow like toaster wires.
Secondly, where did you get the 90% efficiency rating for small generators? I assume your comment about 'thermal included' means using the exhaust to heat the building in the winter.
The last time I checked, an automobile engine was quite a bit more efficient than a lawn mower engine. The heat losses of large engines are proportionally lower than the heat losses of small engines. (Squared - cubed law; losses go as the surface area - heat production as the volume. That's why elephants have a lower metabolic rate than mice; elephants are more efficient because they have lower heat loss per unit of mass.) Simply because of size, the large engines in central generating stations are more efficient than the small ones industry could use.
It would be nice if we lived in a fairy tale world where we could completely solve all problems, but we don't.
The 'Captain Planet' view of polluters - that they are mutant villains who enjoy destroying the environment because they somehow thrive on polluted air and water is not very accurate.
In fact, automobiles are what cleaned up major cities in civilized countries. I know that is an outrageous sounding claim, but stop and think about it. If you really want to see pollution - replace all of the autos with horses.
The disease spread by the flies which thrive on horse droppings would make an impact not only on quality of life but on the length of it.
Every breath you take increases the CO2 load in the atmosphere with each exhale. Shall we all be required to wear some sort of catalytic converter to get rid of that CO2?
Sorry, I'm not going to apologize for that CO2. Life produces waste products - it can't exist without them. The 'My feces smell like roses' attitude of many people in the environmental movement is more than a little annoying.
Even plants pollute. The 'Blue Ridge' and 'Smokey' mountains in the US get their names from the layer of natural smog produced by the vegetation on them. (Ever smell a pine tree? That is a VOC you are smelling. Hit that VOC with sun light and you get smog.)
This is a Yin and Yang world; you can only do so well before you reach the limits of what you can do. Any solution creates an element of a problem.
Does this mean we ought to go back to the era of pre-pollution controlled cars? No - we can do better; for example adjust the ratio of NO to NO2 produced by the catalyst on a car and the automobile becomes a net DESTROYER of ozone; the amount of ozone created by exhaust products becomes less than the amount destroyed by combustion.
By the way, for all of you in Europe complaining about us here in the States - it sounds like old fashioned jealousy to me; everybody hates the rich kid. Quit lying to yourselves, if you could live the way we do here - you would do it in a heartbeat. The Europeans who move here tend to drive big cars and otherwise behave just like the natives do. Sorry, I refuse to accept a load of guilt for living in the US.
How many of you are willing to give up your Pentium III's and Athlons for less power consuming CMOS 8088's running at one Mhz? I thought so.
There is always a trade off between sensitivity and 'noise' in any measuring device; the more sensitive a measurement device is the more prone it is to detecting 'noise' rather than 'signal'.
An example of this is an interferometer - which turns out to be a great device for picking up the passing of trucks on streets in front of the building in which it is being used.
We in the technical fields tend to have an understanding for these kinds of problems - which non technical people lack. This has serious consequences when it is non technical people making judgments based on the results of the test.
Example: company uses one of these devices to screen for diabetes in prospective employees by checking for acetone emissions. Woman has used nail polish remover ( contains acetone ) registers false positive for diabetes. Doesn't get job. Her personal database ( shared by employers ) gets updated, and she can't find work - and she never knows why. Given the choice of hiring the ill or hiring the healthy, who gets the nod?
Someone else, pointed out that it is very difficult to find $20 bills in circulation that don't have traces of cocaine on them; we all ought to have increasingly fun times at airport security.
The fact that these machines would score false positives right and left won't keep the technically challenged in the world from treating them like they are infallible 'witch detectors'.
Profound observations. I would like to expand on them a little: there are already so many laws that even a lawyer can't know what all of them are. If you can't even know what all the laws are, how can you be legally responsible for obeying them?
Of course, the Prosecutors of the world would say "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and I would continue "because if it were we would have to have a reasonable system that anyone could understand, and that might work - so we can't have that, otherwise we couldn't push people around, and we wouldn't like that."
The world is a screwed up place because there are people who want it that way.
Remember the bullies you ran into in school? Did you ever wonder what became of them when they grew up? The answer is that they never did grow up, they just figured out how to get away with bullying people; if you'll check, you'll discover that most of them went into law enforcement.
One thing which Ayn Rand got correct is her description of a "Conspiracy of Cockroaches". The law is an example of one; there is no formal conspiracy, there are just lots of like minded people who are seeking the same ends.
People can be divided into two broad emotional groups, the emotional 'herbivores' - who just want to be left alone to 'chew the cud of their happiness' and the emotional 'carnivores', who want to 'eat other people's happiness'.
The law is a great deal like the lions going to the wildebeests and saying to them "We notice you have a problem with wildebeests getting out of line. Why don't you let us handle the animals that get out of line? We'll make sure that everyone stays in line; we'll punish the ones who stray." And the wildebeests GO FOR IT.
Most people are emotionally 'herbivorous', most lawyers are emotional 'carnivores', we are absolute fools for letting the 'carnivores' set up the legal system.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
Imagine for a second that junk snail mail arrived "Postage Due", and that you had to pay for it. That is a much better analogy for spam, and that is why people like me find it offensive.
If you as a lawyer can defend spam, then the same defense can be used to defend sending junk mail postage due. In fact, since it was a lawyer who invented spam in the first place, I think I'll return the favor by creating 'snail spam'. How about we geeks start sending "Hot teen sex at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" postage due letters to any law firm defending email spam? Would those of you in the law get the point then?
Of course the US mail won't deliver such mail, or would it? If defense of spam is successful, I can't see any reason why the postal service couldn't be forced to collect the postage from the recipients. They could send each person a bill based on the amount of junk mail they receive each month. In fact, I think I'll apply for a method of doing business patent, and collect a royalty from everyone who uses my business plan.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works
How exactly could you tell if M$ is trying to rip someone off; you know they will have some plausible lie ready to cover themselves if they are.
When I see a contract where the customer gets FREE copies of W2K for some reason, I'll believe the "We didn't do it on purpose claim". Until then my response is "Yeah you did."
In point of fact, you are not there to protect me, or my family, you are there to arrest people who are breaking the law. If you get them in the act, that raises the chance of getting a conviction.
Am I grateful for the work you do? Yes, you do dangerous work. I do understand the limitations of your job, and I don't expect more than you can do.
In the final analysis, protecting myself and my family IS my job. I understand that fact, and I have taken the steps necessary to give me as good a chance of doing that job as I can.
The point is that you are not trying to "keep little old ladies and children from being blown to bits"; you are trying to get the government to monitor e-mail.
The plausible lie that you are using is that this "will improve everyone's security", but that is unlikely. E-mail tapping wouldn't have stopped the Unibomber, it wouldn't have stopped Tim McVeigh, it wouldn't have stopped the World Trade Center bombing; in fact, it wouldn't have stopped ANY act of terrorism that has occurred in this country.
What you actually want is to silence the views of people like me; that is why you said something about monitoring anyone who complains about monitoring. You pretend to espouse lofty views - but your motivation is as common as dirt.
Evil has hidden agendas like you do, good does not. Evil pretends to do one thing while actually doing something else, good has no need to hide what it is doing. Yes, YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, and you always will be.
By the way, part of the reason I chose the name Veteran is that I am one; no flags burned, but now and then I do enjoy exposing the occasional street fascist for what he is.
By the way, there were many people during Franklin's era who had ideas and opinions similar to yours. There was even a name for such people: they were called 'Tories'.
Your side lost the war. Perhaps we would all have been better off with a paternalistic Royal government looking after us - but I don't think so.
Those of us who disagree with your approach to things are the intellectual descendants of the people who founded this country. That is why we are fond of quoting people you find obsolete.
These were great men - you Sir are not, and there in lies the difference; your views are common as dirt, their views are profound.
Given the choice of the words of Ben Franklin or those of an Anonymous Coward I choose Franklin.
Sorry to tell you this, but it is NOT the government's job to protect you and your family.
This may come as a shock to you, but THAT IS YOUR JOB. If anything bad ever happens to you or your family, you will discover that to be true.
The government's job is to enforce the law - this may, or may not, result in increased security for you and your family. That is why the Government agencies are called POLICE departments, not SECURITY FORCES; they are not set up to provide security.
We are entering a very dangerous era, and Carnivore is only the tip of the Iceberg.
Computers are intellectual amplifiers, in the same sense that a fork lift is a physical amplifier; they both allow you to handle loads you could not handle unassisted.
The most dangerous aspect of "Computer Crime" is that it is really "Thought Crime" in the sense that Orwell meant in "1984". The problem with "Thought Crimes" is that there is no way to prove you didn't commit them. Example: FBI seizes your computer, they 'find' child pornography on the machine. Go ahead, prove that they planted the evidence. Everything on a hard drive is ones and zero's and as such it can ALWAYS be faked.
I have a personal friend who has been doing police work for 20 years. When I asked him why he quit doing narcotics work he explained that he got tired of framing people. "Look" he said, "drug dealers aren't stupid, they don't keep drugs in their own homes. Every time you read about a bust where the narcotics agents break down a dealers door and find drugs you can just about bet that they brought the evidence along with them."
Law enforcement does not need Carnivore for the same reason that they really don't need to decrypt messages; traffic analysis alone is enough for them to learn almost everything about you. All they need to know is who you are talking to and when you talk to them. This is one of the main reasons that the US has lifted the export restrictions on data.
Carnivore is just snoopy people who want to spy on everybody. Given the chance, they would read everybody's snail mail - not because they would get useful information but just because they could; that is how stupid, petty people behave.
Everybody who believes that with Carnivore the government will only read the mail they are authorized to read is entitled to their belief. I - on the other hand - quit believing in the Tooth Fairy a number of years ago.
Why are copyrights valid for a period after the death of the author? Answer: to remove the economic incentive for murder! If copyrights expired with the death of the author there could be a monetary reason to kill an author; to harm a competitor in the publishing business by destroying the copyright on a work.
I would like to make an observation on the social vacuum argument: that is the argument that creators do not exist in a social vacuum and thus, many people teachers - parents etc. share credit for whatever ideas the creators come up with. That is true, however people who don't create - which is the vast majority of humanity - also share the same matrix, and fail to produce anything new. What distinguishes a creator is that they rise above the level of that social matrix to add something new to it. Most of mankind fails to add anything to the social matrix and exists in a parasitic state; benefiting from the work of those who have added to the matrix while contributing nothing new to society.
Eric Hoffer's observation that "Given freedom of choice most people choose to be like everyone else." is a valid observation. Robert Showalter observed that creators and inventors of any type are people who are different, if they were like everyone else they would do things the way that everyone else does them; they wouldn't feel any need to do things differently.
In my opinion the "Social Vacuum" argument is a bad argument. It sounds good on the surface, but if you examine it closely you will realize that it is just another case of a majority trying to exploit a minority; in this case the non creative, conformist, majority trying to exploit the work of the creative minority while simultaneously trying to make the minority feel guilty for being creative. If ever an intellectual argument could be characterized as a "Pile of Crap" this one qualifies.
As a former activist in the 1960's I thought I would pass on what we learned back then. Before you go out to fight the government, I suggest that you engage an elephant in a fist fight so that you will have some idea of what you are getting into.
Young people quite naturally expect - based on their experience with authority figures in their childhood years - reasonable behavior from people in positions of authority. THIS DOES NOT OCCUR when dealing with government entities.
The legal system is a giant unemotional machine, and if you get caught up in its gears it will grind you into very small pieces. The legal system does not care if you are right, or if your cause is just; the gears will turn no matter what.
The 'Due process' that the Constitution promises you does exist, but processing is what is done to a piece of meat when it is put into a grinder, and the results of the legal system are just as inexorable. Because of its great size and power the legal system is an extremely dangerous machine to get caught up in; roughly 90% of the people who are indicted in the Federal Court system are convicted; the 10% who are not are like the spillage from a meat grinder.
I suggested trying to fight an elephant, because the analogy is pretty good. If the elephant notices you, and you are engaged, your chances of escaping are very small. The one thing which we do know is that nothing bad is going to happen to the elephant.
You have read about cases where civil disobedience has changed things about government. What you do not understand is that the reason that you read about them is because they are so rare that they become news stories. Dog bites man is not news, Man bites dog is.
Back in the 1960-70's we had Kent State. I guess this generation will get a repeat: while the Seattle WTO disorders caught the law off guard, eventually that sort of behavior results in a massacre.
Are there other ways of doing things? Yes - well thought out words and ideas will do far more toward changing things than street protests ever will. Government is not going to lose a street fight - that is the one thing it is designed to win.
Have you ever seen a Cobra gun ship in action? I have. Trust me, civil disobedience won't last 10 seconds against a single Cobra gunship, and the National Guard has thousands of them. All that you will wind up with is lots of dead people, and no one to tell their side of things. History is written by the survivors - not by the people lying dead in the streets.
In a previous post I pointed out that the legal system consists of 100's of millions of lines of 'code', none of which had ever been tested to see if it actually does what it is supposed to do.
In that post I said that based on my analysis of the legal system that I believed that if it were tested with innocent defendants that I expected the legal system to have a false guilty error rate of about 90%.
I am sure that there are a number of people who would like to know why I say that. My analysis is based on the results of simulations of the legal system which are performed in Law school. The simulations are so called 'moot courts' - where students are chosen to take on the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, defendant, witnesses and jury. The moot courts are used to train the students in actual court room behavior and are made as realistic as possible. Often the law professor serves as judge in the simulation, although sometimes an actual visiting judge will sit in.
Although everyone involved knows for a fact that the defendant is innocent the conviction rate in moot court is about the same as it is in real courts, the prosecution wins about 90% of the cases. So great is the illusion of justice created by the rituals of the legal system that it never troubles any of the participants that their simulation arrives at the wrong decision 90% of the time. If the legal system actually worked the defense would win 100% of the cases in moot court. All that the simulations are actually showing is that fabricated cases work just as well as real ones.
In my opinion much of the legal system is carefully designed to keep people who might question it from ever thinking about what is going on inside of it.
Do I think things should be designed before they are coded? Yes, that is the secret to the success of the field of architecture ( as in buildings ). Buildings were once built without planning - the result was a series of kludged up messes which fell down a lot. The revolution of architecture fixed those problems.
However 'planned cities' tend to be massive failures: why? The answer is because a city is too large, complex, and dynamic for anyone, or any group of people to properly design them.
Open source is like the city of Houston, Texas - it just grows according to the needs of the people creating the structures. Houston is a chaotic city with its lack of zoning and central planning; it is constantly changing.
However, the lack of zoning in Houston has one huge benefit: there is no zoned slum like the South Bronx or Watts in Houston. While there are bad sections of the city, nothing is cast in stone by law the way it is in a zoned city. Once an area in a city is zoned "Low income housing" it is doomed to the eventual fate of being a slum.
Is there an argument from the architectural standpoint for a certain amount of components? Yes, we would be in a fix without standardized plumbing components.
The problems I outlined occur when components become the dominant paradigm instead of the smaller one. Planning only works over a certain scale; once the project becomes too complex for humans to handle, planning fails.
Unix does not have reusable components for the same reason than Life doesn't have reusable components.
Think about how easy life would be if only we could reuse existing components. For example I'll build my life by taking the 'Bill Gates wealth component', the 'Alan Cox programming component', the 'Jean Claude Van Dam appearance component', the 'James Bond suave component', and the 'Sarah Michele Gellar girlfriend component'. Nice life huh?
Of course, if everyone else gets to build their life the same way, it becomes a mediocre life not worth living. If everyone gets to choose to be as wealthy as Bill Gates then everyone is equally poor; prices would sky rocket until a loaf of bread was a billion dollars.
If everyone could program like Alan Cox there would be no demand, or use, for you as a programmer. Why would anyone get you to do the coding when they could get any of 6 billion people to do it?
Unix provides a stable base and a uniform API for applications, good design decisions flourish, bad ones die out.
The problem with the reusable component approach is that it requires bad design decisions to flourish. If there is a poor design decision made in a commonly used component it can't be corrected because of the number of programs it would break if it were changed. Instead of the fittest surviving, the most popular survive. What is worse, there is no basis for comparison and improvement, all programs take on a uniform boring sameness; there is no good or bad to choose from, and learn from. No evolution can take place.
What the component approach does is guarantee that bad design decisions live forever, because no one knows they are bad.
Component programming is like a good looking, but heartless woman; looks great at the start of the relationship, but the marriage is a horrible one.
July 5th 2007 - Microsoft today reported a security hole in Windows 2005. The problem has only been detected in the "hi-security" version of Windows 2005, such as those used to control nuclear weapons.
Apparently when the clock rolled over to July 4th 2007, and the machine received any email with misspelled words, the machine will automatically post the password file for the system in plain text on usenet.
Microsoft spokesmen called the problem minor and expected to have a bug fix in place by August 2008.
Microsoft today sent the following email advisory to all of the affected machines. "To whom it may concern: Please do not allow your machine to receive an email with misspelled wurds."
I do remember the video chips of that era, and there was nothing that was a "one chip system" I remember a 16 x 64 display design which used 2102 static ram and about 16 chips total. The company bragged about their low parts count for that.
Your friend must have used static ram for the main memory - the dynamic ram of that era was very tricky to use - super sensitive to timing violations, voltage undershoots, and pattern sensitivity due to ground bounce from the large switching transients. Bypassing it properly was very tricky, as was impedance matching of the line drivers; reflections from transient edges from the drivers were a major cause of memory errors. That was true even of the static chips of that time. I wonder how your friend got the termination of those drivers correct? I am impressed, proper grounding technique for the oscilloscope was critical to keep from getting false signals. I wonder if your friend used series or parallel termination on those drivers.
What sort of power supply did your friend use? There were almost no switchers at reasonable cost available in 1980. Did your friend design his own power supply, or did he use some sort of off the shelf component. Power supplies with adequate current to drive a static ram array and a 6809 cost around 150 (1980) dollars - not a small amount of money back then. If he built it himself I once again am impressed - I wonder how he handled the calculations for sizing the bypass capacitors - too large a value and the ESR of the electrolytics of 1980 would affect the stability of the regulator IC's , too small a value and ripple eats up the noise margin of the regulator. Of course grounding in a power supply is critical; mixing the high current grounds of the bulk filter caps with the low current precision ground of the regulator not only results in a noisy power supply but an unstable one.
I wonder where your friend bought his components?
What did your friend use for the equivalent of a bios, did he write the assembly language for the control program in his onboard EPROM? I didn't know of many machines that could have been used as a cross development system for a 6809 in 1980. I guess he could have used a CP/M machine debugger and produced the byte codes by hand without an assembler. I wonder how he burned that code into the EPROM? Did he go to some place like Hamilton Avnet to burn them, or did he have his own EPROM burner? Back then the only EPROM burners were either stand alone units or S-100 based CP/M units both were rather expensive.
Video monitors of that era were almost all NTSC - driving the signals for a composite monitor was a bit tricky, H-sync, V-sync, front porch, back porch, and the high frequency dot clock all had to be multiplexed onto a single drive line. To design such a circuit without copying a reference design was a substantial effort; it required an active pullup to the one volt positive rail; a resistor resulted in smearing of the pixels.
Are you sure he didn't use a serial port to talk to a terminal? That would have simplified the design significantly.
As I remember Steve Ciarcia of byte magazine was writing about his 6809 design at about that time. I wonder why he would have written about something that any subgenius high school kid could have done?
Slashdot Mirror
That is why I distinguished between creators and manufacturers, the creators do deserve to be rewarded. It is also why I said we as a society need to come up with a system to reward them for their creations.
Wolverine to Magneto: "You're so full of shit, if you were really that righteous it would be you in there."
Can we assume you are available to lead the World Government you wish to establish? Gosh, what a swell world it would be with you in charge. Perhaps the logo of the World Government would be a picture of you with your foot on the throat of all of mankind - grinding them into submission to your mighty will.
Please stand in line with the other psychopaths, your application to be ruler of the world will be considered in due time.
In paragraph two I meant to say:
"the thief has an increase in wealth"
Please note that there are people who do benefit from the theft of physical objects; the thief has and increase in wealth, and the manufacturer of the object benefits, since they get to sell another copy to replace the one which was stolen. This does not compensate for the direct loss of the victim, and the loss to society as a whole from the decrease in value of the original stolen object.
In the case of intellectual property just the opposite occurs. If I copy an existing disk the wealth of society INCREASES; there are now two copies of the original which can do more work than the previous existing copy could. Who loses? The owner of the disk does not lose, he still has his original copy. I benefit, I can now do something I couldn't do before. The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of an additional sale by my act of copying. Notice that I said the MANUFACTURER, not the CREATOR; there is a difference. Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits from the sale of that software.
Please note that in the case of physical theft the manufacturer benefits. I HAVE NEVER HEARD A MANUFACTURER COMPLAIN ABOUT BENEFITING FROM PHYSICAL THEFT. Have you? By failing to do so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
There is a critical difference between material goods and IP; in the digital world the digital equivalent of the 'Star Trek Replicator' exists, it is a CDROM burner or a floppy disk drive. Given a pattern to work from these can replicate the original. Think how much the economy would change if physical replicators existed. Manufacturing would become obsolete - each person with a replicator would in effect become a manufacturer.
What the software MANUFACTURERS want to do is to benefit from the fact that replication exists in the digital world while preventing everyone else from using their own replicators. Of course they do, if physical replicators existed physical manufacturers would try to keep people from using them while they got to use them to make outrageous profits.
Last year Microsoft had NET profits of 40% of sales. That is NET, not GROSS profits. The net figure comes after their accountants have pulled every trick in the book trying to reduce the number to minimize taxes. Microsoft's huge profit occur because they are using replication technology to build their product, it costs them less than a dollar to create a copy of a program which sells for hundreds of dollars.
Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which Microsoft turns into billions of dollars worth of profits by using their replicators, and forbidding us to use ours.
The free market system has worked well for us in the past when it comes to the manufacturing of physical goods. However it breaks down in the face of replication technology. We need to come up with a system which rewards the actual CREATORS of software instead of rewarding people who are using digital replicators to gouge the public for billions of dollars, while trying to deny to individuals the use of that technology.
Secondly, where did you get the 90% efficiency rating for small generators? I assume your comment about 'thermal included' means using the exhaust to heat the building in the winter.
The last time I checked, an automobile engine was quite a bit more efficient than a lawn mower engine. The heat losses of large engines are proportionally lower than the heat losses of small engines. (Squared - cubed law; losses go as the surface area - heat production as the volume. That's why elephants have a lower metabolic rate than mice; elephants are more efficient because they have lower heat loss per unit of mass.) Simply because of size, the large engines in central generating stations are more efficient than the small ones industry could use.
The 'Captain Planet' view of polluters - that they are mutant villains who enjoy destroying the environment because they somehow thrive on polluted air and water is not very accurate.
In fact, automobiles are what cleaned up major cities in civilized countries. I know that is an outrageous sounding claim, but stop and think about it. If you really want to see pollution - replace all of the autos with horses.
The disease spread by the flies which thrive on horse droppings would make an impact not only on quality of life but on the length of it.
Every breath you take increases the CO2 load in the atmosphere with each exhale. Shall we all be required to wear some sort of catalytic converter to get rid of that CO2?
Sorry, I'm not going to apologize for that CO2. Life produces waste products - it can't exist without them. The 'My feces smell like roses' attitude of many people in the environmental movement is more than a little annoying.
Even plants pollute. The 'Blue Ridge' and 'Smokey' mountains in the US get their names from the layer of natural smog produced by the vegetation on them. (Ever smell a pine tree? That is a VOC you are smelling. Hit that VOC with sun light and you get smog.)
This is a Yin and Yang world; you can only do so well before you reach the limits of what you can do. Any solution creates an element of a problem.
Does this mean we ought to go back to the era of pre-pollution controlled cars? No - we can do better; for example adjust the ratio of NO to NO2 produced by the catalyst on a car and the automobile becomes a net DESTROYER of ozone; the amount of ozone created by exhaust products becomes less than the amount destroyed by combustion.
By the way, for all of you in Europe complaining about us here in the States - it sounds like old fashioned jealousy to me; everybody hates the rich kid. Quit lying to yourselves, if you could live the way we do here - you would do it in a heartbeat. The Europeans who move here tend to drive big cars and otherwise behave just like the natives do. Sorry, I refuse to accept a load of guilt for living in the US.
How many of you are willing to give up your Pentium III's and Athlons for less power consuming CMOS 8088's running at one Mhz? I thought so.
An example of this is an interferometer - which turns out to be a great device for picking up the passing of trucks on streets in front of the building in which it is being used.
We in the technical fields tend to have an understanding for these kinds of problems - which non technical people lack. This has serious consequences when it is non technical people making judgments based on the results of the test.
Example: company uses one of these devices to screen for diabetes in prospective employees by checking for acetone emissions. Woman has used nail polish remover ( contains acetone ) registers false positive for diabetes. Doesn't get job. Her personal database ( shared by employers ) gets updated, and she can't find work - and she never knows why. Given the choice of hiring the ill or hiring the healthy, who gets the nod?
Someone else, pointed out that it is very difficult to find $20 bills in circulation that don't have traces of cocaine on them; we all ought to have increasingly fun times at airport security.
The fact that these machines would score false positives right and left won't keep the technically challenged in the world from treating them like they are infallible 'witch detectors'.
Hadn't thought of that, good point.
Of course, the Prosecutors of the world would say "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and I would continue "because if it were we would have to have a reasonable system that anyone could understand, and that might work - so we can't have that, otherwise we couldn't push people around, and we wouldn't like that."
The world is a screwed up place because there are people who want it that way.
Remember the bullies you ran into in school? Did you ever wonder what became of them when they grew up? The answer is that they never did grow up, they just figured out how to get away with bullying people; if you'll check, you'll discover that most of them went into law enforcement.
One thing which Ayn Rand got correct is her description of a "Conspiracy of Cockroaches". The law is an example of one; there is no formal conspiracy, there are just lots of like minded people who are seeking the same ends.
People can be divided into two broad emotional groups, the emotional 'herbivores' - who just want to be left alone to 'chew the cud of their happiness' and the emotional 'carnivores', who want to 'eat other people's happiness'.
The law is a great deal like the lions going to the wildebeests and saying to them "We notice you have a problem with wildebeests getting out of line. Why don't you let us handle the animals that get out of line? We'll make sure that everyone stays in line; we'll punish the ones who stray." And the wildebeests GO FOR IT.
Most people are emotionally 'herbivorous', most lawyers are emotional 'carnivores', we are absolute fools for letting the 'carnivores' set up the legal system.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
If you as a lawyer can defend spam, then the same defense can be used to defend sending junk mail postage due. In fact, since it was a lawyer who invented spam in the first place, I think I'll return the favor by creating 'snail spam'. How about we geeks start sending "Hot teen sex at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" postage due letters to any law firm defending email spam? Would those of you in the law get the point then?
Of course the US mail won't deliver such mail, or would it? If defense of spam is successful, I can't see any reason why the postal service couldn't be forced to collect the postage from the recipients. They could send each person a bill based on the amount of junk mail they receive each month. In fact, I think I'll apply for a method of doing business patent, and collect a royalty from everyone who uses my business plan.
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works
How exactly could you tell if M$ is trying to rip someone off; you know they will have some plausible lie ready to cover themselves if they are.
When I see a contract where the customer gets FREE copies of W2K for some reason, I'll believe the "We didn't do it on purpose claim". Until then my response is "Yeah you did."
Am I grateful for the work you do? Yes, you do dangerous work. I do understand the limitations of your job, and I don't expect more than you can do.
In the final analysis, protecting myself and my family IS my job. I understand that fact, and I have taken the steps necessary to give me as good a chance of doing that job as I can.
The plausible lie that you are using is that this "will improve everyone's security", but that is unlikely. E-mail tapping wouldn't have stopped the Unibomber, it wouldn't have stopped Tim McVeigh, it wouldn't have stopped the World Trade Center bombing; in fact, it wouldn't have stopped ANY act of terrorism that has occurred in this country.
What you actually want is to silence the views of people like me; that is why you said something about monitoring anyone who complains about monitoring. You pretend to espouse lofty views - but your motivation is as common as dirt.
Evil has hidden agendas like you do, good does not. Evil pretends to do one thing while actually doing something else, good has no need to hide what it is doing. Yes, YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, and you always will be.
By the way, part of the reason I chose the name Veteran is that I am one; no flags burned, but now and then I do enjoy exposing the occasional street fascist for what he is.
Your side lost the war. Perhaps we would all have been better off with a paternalistic Royal government looking after us - but I don't think so.
Those of us who disagree with your approach to things are the intellectual descendants of the people who founded this country. That is why we are fond of quoting people you find obsolete.
These were great men - you Sir are not, and there in lies the difference; your views are common as dirt, their views are profound.
Given the choice of the words of Ben Franklin or those of an Anonymous Coward I choose Franklin.
This may come as a shock to you, but THAT IS YOUR JOB. If anything bad ever happens to you or your family, you will discover that to be true.
The government's job is to enforce the law - this may, or may not, result in increased security for you and your family. That is why the Government agencies are called POLICE departments, not SECURITY FORCES; they are not set up to provide security.
Computers are intellectual amplifiers, in the same sense that a fork lift is a physical amplifier; they both allow you to handle loads you could not handle unassisted.
The most dangerous aspect of "Computer Crime" is that it is really "Thought Crime" in the sense that Orwell meant in "1984". The problem with "Thought Crimes" is that there is no way to prove you didn't commit them. Example: FBI seizes your computer, they 'find' child pornography on the machine. Go ahead, prove that they planted the evidence. Everything on a hard drive is ones and zero's and as such it can ALWAYS be faked.
I have a personal friend who has been doing police work for 20 years. When I asked him why he quit doing narcotics work he explained that he got tired of framing people. "Look" he said, "drug dealers aren't stupid, they don't keep drugs in their own homes. Every time you read about a bust where the narcotics agents break down a dealers door and find drugs you can just about bet that they brought the evidence along with them."
Law enforcement does not need Carnivore for the same reason that they really don't need to decrypt messages; traffic analysis alone is enough for them to learn almost everything about you. All they need to know is who you are talking to and when you talk to them. This is one of the main reasons that the US has lifted the export restrictions on data.
Carnivore is just snoopy people who want to spy on everybody. Given the chance, they would read everybody's snail mail - not because they would get useful information but just because they could; that is how stupid, petty people behave.
Everybody who believes that with Carnivore the government will only read the mail they are authorized to read is entitled to their belief. I - on the other hand - quit believing in the Tooth Fairy a number of years ago.
Why are copyrights valid for a period after the death of the author? Answer: to remove the economic incentive for murder! If copyrights expired with the death of the author there could be a monetary reason to kill an author; to harm a competitor in the publishing business by destroying the copyright on a work.
Eric Hoffer's observation that "Given freedom of choice most people choose to be like everyone else." is a valid observation. Robert Showalter observed that creators and inventors of any type are people who are different, if they were like everyone else they would do things the way that everyone else does them; they wouldn't feel any need to do things differently.
In my opinion the "Social Vacuum" argument is a bad argument. It sounds good on the surface, but if you examine it closely you will realize that it is just another case of a majority trying to exploit a minority; in this case the non creative, conformist, majority trying to exploit the work of the creative minority while simultaneously trying to make the minority feel guilty for being creative. If ever an intellectual argument could be characterized as a "Pile of Crap" this one qualifies.
Young people quite naturally expect - based on their experience with authority figures in their childhood years - reasonable behavior from people in positions of authority. THIS DOES NOT OCCUR when dealing with government entities.
The legal system is a giant unemotional machine, and if you get caught up in its gears it will grind you into very small pieces. The legal system does not care if you are right, or if your cause is just; the gears will turn no matter what.
The 'Due process' that the Constitution promises you does exist, but processing is what is done to a piece of meat when it is put into a grinder, and the results of the legal system are just as inexorable. Because of its great size and power the legal system is an extremely dangerous machine to get caught up in; roughly 90% of the people who are indicted in the Federal Court system are convicted; the 10% who are not are like the spillage from a meat grinder.
I suggested trying to fight an elephant, because the analogy is pretty good. If the elephant notices you, and you are engaged, your chances of escaping are very small. The one thing which we do know is that nothing bad is going to happen to the elephant.
You have read about cases where civil disobedience has changed things about government. What you do not understand is that the reason that you read about them is because they are so rare that they become news stories. Dog bites man is not news, Man bites dog is.
Back in the 1960-70's we had Kent State. I guess this generation will get a repeat: while the Seattle WTO disorders caught the law off guard, eventually that sort of behavior results in a massacre.
Are there other ways of doing things? Yes - well thought out words and ideas will do far more toward changing things than street protests ever will. Government is not going to lose a street fight - that is the one thing it is designed to win.
Have you ever seen a Cobra gun ship in action? I have. Trust me, civil disobedience won't last 10 seconds against a single Cobra gunship, and the National Guard has thousands of them. All that you will wind up with is lots of dead people, and no one to tell their side of things. History is written by the survivors - not by the people lying dead in the streets.
In that post I said that based on my analysis of the legal system that I believed that if it were tested with innocent defendants that I expected the legal system to have a false guilty error rate of about 90%.
I am sure that there are a number of people who would like to know why I say that. My analysis is based on the results of simulations of the legal system which are performed in Law school. The simulations are so called 'moot courts' - where students are chosen to take on the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, defendant, witnesses and jury. The moot courts are used to train the students in actual court room behavior and are made as realistic as possible. Often the law professor serves as judge in the simulation, although sometimes an actual visiting judge will sit in.
Although everyone involved knows for a fact that the defendant is innocent the conviction rate in moot court is about the same as it is in real courts, the prosecution wins about 90% of the cases. So great is the illusion of justice created by the rituals of the legal system that it never troubles any of the participants that their simulation arrives at the wrong decision 90% of the time. If the legal system actually worked the defense would win 100% of the cases in moot court. All that the simulations are actually showing is that fabricated cases work just as well as real ones.
In my opinion much of the legal system is carefully designed to keep people who might question it from ever thinking about what is going on inside of it.
No argument, good insights.
However 'planned cities' tend to be massive failures: why? The answer is because a city is too large, complex, and dynamic for anyone, or any group of people to properly design them.
Open source is like the city of Houston, Texas - it just grows according to the needs of the people creating the structures. Houston is a chaotic city with its lack of zoning and central planning; it is constantly changing.
However, the lack of zoning in Houston has one huge benefit: there is no zoned slum like the South Bronx or Watts in Houston. While there are bad sections of the city, nothing is cast in stone by law the way it is in a zoned city. Once an area in a city is zoned "Low income housing" it is doomed to the eventual fate of being a slum.
Is there an argument from the architectural standpoint for a certain amount of components? Yes, we would be in a fix without standardized plumbing components.
The problems I outlined occur when components become the dominant paradigm instead of the smaller one. Planning only works over a certain scale; once the project becomes too complex for humans to handle, planning fails.
Think about how easy life would be if only we could reuse existing components. For example I'll build my life by taking the 'Bill Gates wealth component', the 'Alan Cox programming component', the 'Jean Claude Van Dam appearance component', the 'James Bond suave component', and the 'Sarah Michele Gellar girlfriend component'. Nice life huh?
Of course, if everyone else gets to build their life the same way, it becomes a mediocre life not worth living. If everyone gets to choose to be as wealthy as Bill Gates then everyone is equally poor; prices would sky rocket until a loaf of bread was a billion dollars.
If everyone could program like Alan Cox there would be no demand, or use, for you as a programmer. Why would anyone get you to do the coding when they could get any of 6 billion people to do it?
Unix provides a stable base and a uniform API for applications, good design decisions flourish, bad ones die out.
The problem with the reusable component approach is that it requires bad design decisions to flourish. If there is a poor design decision made in a commonly used component it can't be corrected because of the number of programs it would break if it were changed. Instead of the fittest surviving, the most popular survive. What is worse, there is no basis for comparison and improvement, all programs take on a uniform boring sameness; there is no good or bad to choose from, and learn from. No evolution can take place.
What the component approach does is guarantee that bad design decisions live forever, because no one knows they are bad.
Component programming is like a good looking, but heartless woman; looks great at the start of the relationship, but the marriage is a horrible one.
Apparently when the clock rolled over to July 4th 2007, and the machine received any email with misspelled words, the machine will automatically post the password file for the system in plain text on usenet.
Microsoft spokesmen called the problem minor and expected to have a bug fix in place by August 2008.
Microsoft today sent the following email advisory to all of the affected machines. "To whom it may concern: Please do not allow your machine to receive an email with misspelled wurds."
I do remember the video chips of that era, and there was nothing that was a "one chip system" I remember a 16 x 64 display design which used 2102 static ram and about 16 chips total. The company bragged about their low parts count for that.
Your friend must have used static ram for the main memory - the dynamic ram of that era was very tricky to use - super sensitive to timing violations, voltage undershoots, and pattern sensitivity due to ground bounce from the large switching transients. Bypassing it properly was very tricky, as was impedance matching of the line drivers; reflections from transient edges from the drivers were a major cause of memory errors. That was true even of the static chips of that time. I wonder how your friend got the termination of those drivers correct? I am impressed, proper grounding technique for the oscilloscope was critical to keep from getting false signals. I wonder if your friend used series or parallel termination on those drivers.
What sort of power supply did your friend use? There were almost no switchers at reasonable cost available in 1980. Did your friend design his own power supply, or did he use some sort of off the shelf component. Power supplies with adequate current to drive a static ram array and a 6809 cost around 150 (1980) dollars - not a small amount of money back then. If he built it himself I once again am impressed - I wonder how he handled the calculations for sizing the bypass capacitors - too large a value and the ESR of the electrolytics of 1980 would affect the stability of the regulator IC's , too small a value and ripple eats up the noise margin of the regulator. Of course grounding in a power supply is critical; mixing the high current grounds of the bulk filter caps with the low current precision ground of the regulator not only results in a noisy power supply but an unstable one.
I wonder where your friend bought his components?
What did your friend use for the equivalent of a bios, did he write the assembly language for the control program in his onboard EPROM? I didn't know of many machines that could have been used as a cross development system for a 6809 in 1980. I guess he could have used a CP/M machine debugger and produced the byte codes by hand without an assembler. I wonder how he burned that code into the EPROM? Did he go to some place like Hamilton Avnet to burn them, or did he have his own EPROM burner? Back then the only EPROM burners were either stand alone units or S-100 based CP/M units both were rather expensive.
Video monitors of that era were almost all NTSC - driving the signals for a composite monitor was a bit tricky, H-sync, V-sync, front porch, back porch, and the high frequency dot clock all had to be multiplexed onto a single drive line. To design such a circuit without copying a reference design was a substantial effort; it required an active pullup to the one volt positive rail; a resistor resulted in smearing of the pixels.
Are you sure he didn't use a serial port to talk to a terminal? That would have simplified the design significantly.
As I remember Steve Ciarcia of byte magazine was writing about his 6809 design at about that time. I wonder why he would have written about something that any subgenius high school kid could have done?